Travelers on the Yreka Trail recorded difficult passage through splendid pine timber, fir and spruce, and over the dividing ridge of the Shasta Mountains on September 5, 1852, when Hinsdale Truman Shepard called the roads very rough and bad after eighteen miles of travel. On the last day of September 1854, Andrew Soule wrote of a twelve-mile journey to a swamp, a place now called Grass Valley.